“Is that what the company is paying him? Twelve and a half million dollars?”
“That’s what I heard, yes. That’s what it takes to buy out his contract. Some people do feel that paying him that money is—rewarding him for being a traitor.”
“Twelve and a half million dollars,” Sheila said again. “That really is remarkable. But you’re wrong, you know, Lydia. He couldn’t have been responsible for Jon’s going to jail. If he had been, Jon would have done anything before he paid him any money. He’d have killed him first.”
“A lot of people wish they had,” Lydia said.
“If they really wanted to they would have,” Sheila said confidently. “Isn’t he one of those people who takes strychnine? I heard he was.”
“What do you mean, one of those people who takes strychnine? How can you ‘take’ strychnine? It’s a poison.”
“I know. But it’s gotten to be a big thing the last two or three years. People mix a very little bit of it with their drug of choice—you know, cocaine, or downers or whatever—or else they do it with baking soda. Then they snort it up in lines. I think the danger is half the point. If you make a mistake, you end up dead. But they do it.”
“Dear God,” Lydia said.
“All you’d have to do is slip him a little extra at a party or something,” Sheila said. “Make him a present of some cocaine if he takes that and have the cocaine stuffed full. I mean, everybody knows his habits. The police would just think it was his own damn fault.”
“Mmm,” Lydia said, and looked pale.
Sheila decided that her face looked just fine and that she would have to live with it. Since she had excellent genes for both bone structure and wrinkling, it would have looked fine without any makeup at all. She picked up her gold-link minaudière—$72,500 at Tiffany’s—checked to make sure it held a lipstick, a fold-up comb, and a hundred-dollar bill, and stood up. The Dior ball gown was perfect for her, obviously expensive but not at all conservative. Her arm needed a bracelet and she got the one that matched the earrings. Then she let herself feel just a little guilty that she had all this real jewelry in her apartment. She knew she wasn’t supposed to wear real jewelry. She was supposed to have it copied and wear the fakes. Sheila had never been able to see the point.
“Well,” she said, “I’ll tell you what I think. I think it would be a good thing if somebody did slip Mr. McAdam a little something. He’s ruining my life. Missy Berringer was so upset, she disinvited me to her birthday party.”
“I thought you’d decided not to go to Missy Berringer’s birthday party.”
“I had. But I hadn’t told her that. I was waiting until the last minute. Now she gets the points and I get the shaft. It isn’t fair. Are you coming, Lydia?”
“Of course I’m coming,” Lydia said.
“Good,” Sheila told her. “Eight o’clock is incredibly hick for a dinner party, but it is the Metropolitan Museum, and there’s nothing we can do. Maybe Mr. McAdam will be there and I can kill him.”
“Mmmm,” Lydia Boynton said.
Sheila swept out past her, never looking back. Really, with Jon coming home, it would be all to the good to get rid of Lydia. It would be so damn nice not to have to cater to a woman who was shocked by everything she said. As for Mr. McAdam, she decided to add him to the list of people she prayed hard for the deaths of, the list that included her mother, her stepfather, and the boy who had thrown her over for Monica Jess in the third grade.
At the top of that list was her husband, Jon Baird.
4
Anthony Derwent Baird was usually known as Tony, and he didn’t want Donald McAdam to die as much as he wanted him to disappear. Disappear was probably the wrong word for it, too. Cease to exist. Never have existed. Become real only on an existential plane. Tony kept thinking there had to be something that would cover it. He just couldn’t seem to find it. He kept thinking there had to be some way to fix it, too. In his saner moments, he knew that was impossible.
It was now seven o’clock on the last day of August and not one of his saner moments. Tony was sitting in a back booth at the Grubb Clubb, under a tangle of wires and pipes and raw insulation in a corner just far enough away from the noise to make conversation feasible. The noise was coming from a rap-and-thunder group called Heckler Dick, which was as local as you could get in Manhattan and also very bad. The conversation was coming from Mickey Kendrick, who had been Tony’s roommate at St. Paul’s and suitemate at Yale and who was wearing a suit. Tony himself was stretched out along the bench shoved up against the back wall, a tall lanky man in jeans and a black chambray work shirt. Tony took after his mother’s family, and people often said he looked nothing at all like his father. It wasn’t true. He had Jon Baird’s eyes, right down to the glint at the center of them that told anyone with any sense at all that this was not a man to mess with.